Chris's Crime Forum

Natascha Kampusch left for school one morning in March of 1998.She never got there.A young girl reported seeing her being dragged into a white van.Natascha's disappearance is one of Austria's most well known crime mysteries.

August 2006 this brave young girl,now 18, escaped from her captor.The following is her story,with snips from newspaper articles.

Vienna - An Austrian teenager who escaped eight years' captivity in the hands of a man she had to call "master" simply asked for her favourite toy car when she was reunited with her family, her father said on Thursday.

Speaking about the moment the family was reunited, Kampusch's father, Ludwig Koch, told the Austrian daily Kurier: "She said: 'Dad, I love you.'

"And the next question was: 'Is my toy car still there?'

"It was Natascha's favourite toy, I never gave it away in all those years."

"I always put out of my mind the thought that she was dead."

He and her half-sister identified the 18-year-old on Wednesday and were joined by her mother on Thursday at the hotel where Kampusch is staying with a policewoman and a psychologist.

She escaped on Wednesday while her kidnapper was distracted, police said.

A man police believe to be her captor committed suicide by throwing himself under a train soon afterwards.

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DNA tests on Friday confirmed Ms Kampusch's claim to be the schoolgirl who disappeared eight years ago.

Her captor, Wolfgang Priklopil, 44, killed himself after her escape.

The communications technician is believed to have kept Ms Kampusch in a concealed, sound-proof chamber in his cellar.

On the day of her kidnapping, she was dragged into a vehicle and told: "Keep still, lie down or something is going to happen to you," the paper said.

A policewoman who has interviewed Ms Kampusch told Austrian state TV that her captor had said he had singled her out.

He apparently told her if he hadn't kidnapped her "that day, it would've been the next", Sabine Freudenberger said.

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At the time of her disappearance, the police questioned hundreds of men, including Wolfgang Priklopil, 44. But they failed to discover Priklopil's horrific secret: Beneath his house, behind a steel door, was a tiny, windowless cell. It was Kampusch's prison for eight years.

"I threw water bottles against the walls, banged on them with my fists, so that maybe someone would hear me," Kampusch said.

But she knew one failed escape attempt and he would never let her out. So gradually she won his trust. Eventually, on rare occasions, she even went shopping with him.

"He barely left my side," she said. "I couldn't speak to anyone because he threatened to kill them and me. I tried to signal my distress with my eyes, but no one noticed."

When her captor made her vacuum his car, she finally made her break for freedom. The vacuum was so loud, he had to step away when his phone rang. That's when she took off to a neighbor's house.

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"I ran out through the garden gate and became dizzy," she said. "I felt for the first time how weak I really was."

The first people Kampusch approached turned away from her pleas for help. Then she leapt over a fence and spied a woman in a kitchen through a window. Kampusch persuaded her to call the police.

http://snipurl.com/w3qp

Austria's 'girl in the cellar' case reopened
POLICE in Austria have reopened a criminal probe into the Natascha Kampusch kidnap case — effectively branding the girl in the cellar a liar.

The new investigation seeks to prove her abductor, Wolfgang Priklopil, had an accomplice, believed to be his former business partner Ernst Holzapfel.

It is the second time Austria has re-examined the evidence since Ms Kampusch freed herself from her kidnapper after 8 ½ years of captivity in a secret, soundproofed cellar. Hours later Priklopil committed suicide and the case was closed. Ms Kampusch has since become a millionairess through TV interviews and sticks to her story that Priklopil acted alone.

A school friend of Ms Kampusch suffered a nervous breakdown when police refused to believe she saw two people grab her friend and put her into a white van on March 2, 1998.

Sabine Kohler, now 23, said: "I was shocked by what I saw, but then just as the second man was climbing into the van he looked at me. It was as if the look was saying 'I know you — I know who you are — I know where to find you'." She says her life since then has been lived in terror that the man might one day return.

She also claims police, eager to close the case to cover up their errors, constantly tried to get her to change her story.

Mr Holzapfel has denied knowing that his friend and business partner was a child kidnapper and Ms Kampusch steadfastly refuses to implicate a second person. Experts say the relationship in the house Ms Kampusch shared with Priklopil evolved into a kind of love — a love police now believe extends to keeping Priklopil's secrets safe in death.

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